Our Mission 2017, published in April, provided a framework for our strategic choices. It explained how we serve the public interest by improving how financial markets function and how firms conduct their business. It also explained how we regulate to deliver good outcomes for a wide range of users of financial services – including individuals, businesses and the economy. When we published our Mission, we also committed to publish a range of documents that would explain our approach to regulation in more depth.

The Approach to Consumers paper explores our approach to regulating for retail consumers. It sets out our initial views on what good looks like for all retail consumers, and aims to clearly explain how we will work to diagnose and remedy actual and potential harm, giving more certainty about our framework.

Our Mission also makes clear that we have finite resources, and in some cases we need to collaborate with others to address issues like vulnerability and how we prioritise it in our work, financial exclusion and the limits of consumer responsibility.

Addressing these complex and overlapping issues requires a nuanced approach. Our stakeholders should rightly be able to support and challenge these decisions – and understand our rationale for making them.

Next steps

The consultation period for our Approach has now closed. We are now analysing the responses and will publish our findings in due course.